The official Blog for the University of Leicester 2012 entrance to the iGEM competition. Where you will find out more about the team, the project and what we're doing. Regular updates will be posted, as well as ways to get involved and help the team yourself.
Feel free to contact us regarding anything on the blog at - igem@leicester.ac.uk and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Pages

Thursday, 9 February 2012

Where it all began

First
news about this opportunity was on the 2nd of January from a
fellow undergraduate at the university, Anthony Cox, and from here there
was a avalanche of ideas, questions, what if's and could we's. This all
started from one little Facebook message with a link to the
International Genetic Engineered Machine competition (iGEM for short),
which now with all fingers crossed will be the sole aim for Summer 2012
to be completing this mission. The mountain which we needed to climb was
that of a very quickly approaching deadline on the 20th of Jan for
wellcome trust stipend funding, with at the same all of the parties
involved having at least 2 if not 3 exams during that final week.
Upon first hearing of the summer placement idea i was skeptical of it
getting off the ground, however it leaped up and decided it would start
to gallop through the efforts of the first 5 confirmed members of the
team, being Anthony Cox, Nathan Hanna, Luke Thompson, William Harrison
and Myself.
Our first challenge was to find the much needed 2
supervisors in order to have a hope of starting a team. This was
achieved by a very lucky email to Anthony's Personal Tutor at
the University Dr. Badge, who coincidentally had previously been wanting
to enter a team and was extremely enthusiastic already , almost by fate
we secured our first. Nevertheless we needed a second, so more emails
we're sent to contacts in the university, eventually hearing back from
Dr Badge that we had secured another supervisor from the genetics
department.
Nevertheless we still had other fish to fry,
the largest of those being trying to come up with feasible ideas for a
project. After exploring the countless avenues of fuel production,
animal feed-stock production, bio-degradation, improving the readability
of bio-sensors, 3rd world bio-sensors and bio-sensors to detect prions
(A form of protein in a misfolded form making it infectious), we came
up with a list of many different ideas each researched to a
basic level. At the same time as we were doing this, we were also sending emails to fellow friends at the university on the biological
sciences course's, as well as other disciplines and managed to recruit other
fellow undergraduates to fill the remaining 5 places on the team. Which
on its own was quite a feat with many solely concentrating on revising
for the 1st semester of 2nd year exams, which i can assure you, needed
revising for. However through combined efforts of the first 5 confirmed,
we somehow managed to pull it all off and presented our ideas to our
supervisor directly after the first exam, he also having ideas of his own.
From this meeting the now main idea was finalized and we proceeded to
fill out the form for the Wellcome trust stipend.